Over the last year I've been quietly building Actual, a personal budgeting tool. It's a free local app that will sync across all devices. I'm building it because I wanted a tool that is flexible and simple, with a solid budgeting system.

We officially announced prettier over two months ago as a way to solve the problem of wasting time formatting your code. It started as an experiment but it clearly resonated with a lot of people, amassing ~7000 GitHub stars and over 100,000 monthly npm downloads in just two months. Now it's time for 1.0.

Several people at React Conf asked me for advice on becoming a better programmer. For some reason, people see me as a pretty advanced programmer worth listening to. I thought it would be worthwhile to write down my "mental model" for how I have approached programming over the years.